Fiction Journalism

Argentinean writer kidnaps Mexican president. 

Plans to return him in 20 bubble years.

            Before Enrique Peña Nieto began his presidency, the man who has standing alone thinking that the battle between the two people competing for the presidency was no battle at all because of Peña Nieto level of literacy was Carlos Fuentes. He did not imagine his country México with a president who had never in his life read a single book. “I don´t even want to think that Peña Nieto could be president of the Republic, and not because he has not read anything. If someone were to ask me at a book fair: What books have you read? I would say the Constitution and that would be the end of it. He made a public demonstration of ignorance. The problems are too big, the challenges are huge, and the character seems rather small to me.” –this is what Carlos Fuentes said during an interview a few months before his death(lets not go into details here, he died of natural causes).

            It seems like César Aira wants to not only stay in history as a writer but also as a political activist. The news of the incident was received during the morning because no one could find Peña Nieto to give him breakfast. He maybe went out for a walk, some thought, but the little book by César Aira was found laying on the bed. In it there was his latest book and publication, named: El prisionero literario –The literary prisoner-. Since Aira tends to write short books that are usually no longer than one hundred pages. The mystery was quickly solved by a young man named Lalo Cura, one of the closest friends of the detective that was put on the case. He stole the book and read it in a flash to swiftly discover that César Aira was carrying out his already written fiction.

            In his book he mentioned Carlos Fuentes as the reason, and it would have not been the first time he used him in his literary work before. In another one of his books he imagines an army of clones of the man Carlos Fuentes. In this one he was mixing two of his fictions: The Magician & Literature Conference. The main character of the Magician is a man who had secretly been hiding to the world his own truth, that he is a real magician. The thing about him is that he has no imagination, so he does not come up with new tricks and even though he uses real magic to do his tricks, he only copies the tricks made by other magicians who use trickery to achieve them.

In his new book, The literary prisoner, he narrated on how the magician(he uses his magic powers to write books) writes a book where the Mexican president is kidnapped by himself, using real magic, and takes him to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to live within a floating bubble that automatically feeds him and covers all of his needs while handing him out a new book every time he finishes one.

Polshka, the name of this magician, explains that no one was going to notice that the president had disappeared because he would use his magic powers to stop time during the lapse that Enrique Peña Nieto would spend inside the bubble reading. And he would only let Peña Nieto leave by the time he had read a carefully made selection of a thousand books. He explains, says Lalo Cura, that in his calculations it was going to take twenty years for Peña Nieto to finish reading the books. But it took a lot less time. It only took 4 years for Peña Nieto to finish reading the books because there was nothing else to do inside the bubble but look at the ocean and that became boring after two weeks for him –besides finding out he could not use his magic until the spell of Polshka was over-.

            What Polshka was not counting on was that Peña Nieto was a sorcerer too, so as soon as Polshka used the magic against an unknown brother of his, the price to pay was his life. This was a rule of magic he was not aware of. The spell worked, and after four bubble years, Peña Nieto left the bubble and returned the afternoon of the first of April just after this article was finished. He had arrived much earlier but wanted to go for a walk around some areas of Mexico City that he was now interested in. He had a certain nostalgia for Bucareli street.